WHAT SCIENCE AND SUPER-ACHIEVERS TEACH US ABOUT HUMAN POTENTIAL

The book

The author

David Shenk is the national bestselling author of five previous books, including The Forgetting ("remarkable" - Los Angeles Times), Data Smog ("indispensable" - New York Times), and The Immortal Game ("superb" - Wall Street Journal). He is a correspondent for TheAtlantic.com, and has contributed to National Geographic, Slate, The New York Times, Gourmet, Harper's, The New Yorker, NPR, and PBS.

June 30, 2009

Marshall
McLuhan[i]was right. A new study published
in the journal Cell Biology provides the first direct proof of a longheld
notion among technologists: tools fundamentally alter the way we perceive our
own bodies.

"To
be accurate in doing an action with a tool, you need to make the tool become a
part of your body," lead researchers Lucilla Cardinali and
Claude Bernard told The Scientist.

The
implications of this idea are staggering, and it is something every high school
student needs to learn. Using tools intelligently and appropriately is
essential to a balanced and successful life. That begins with an understanding
of our relationship with tools and how they alter our way of seeing the world.

For more on this idea, start with the science here. Then delve
into the idea here.

[i] McLuhan
wrote that tools are extensions of the human body. A detailed investigation of
McLuhan's inspiration for this idea can be found in the footnotes
for Richard Cavell's McLuhan in Space.
More on the McLuhan here.

June 29, 2009

Put on some decent headphones and set aside eight minutes of your life to enjoy this very special gift from Neil Young and special guest, in Hyde Park, London, June 27, 2009:

This would be a sensational cover even without the playful and warm addition of Mr. McCartney. What makes Neil Young such a transcendent musical force? Here are a few insights:

First, this comment from Kurt Hirsch, an old friend and loyal draft-reader:

"I think it has to do with what you discuss in your forthcoming book – Young’s willingness to experiment and fail. This fearlessness (and, in Young’s case, stubbornness) has probably allowed him to roam in a much larger field."

"You
gotta keep changing....I'd rather keep changing and
lose a lot of people along the way. If that's the price, I'll pay it. I don't
give a shit if my audience is a hundred or a hundred million. It doesn't make
any difference to me. I'm convinced that what sells and what I do are two
completely different things. If they meet, it's coincidence."

"In person, Neil Young is one of the sweetest and most unpretentious rock legends you'll ever meet. But at work, he is one of the most selfish and uncompromising. He yields to no one else's needs or opinions in the service of his deeply personal muse, which has enabled him to create a timeless oeuvre that goes everywhere from heartbreaking acoustic prayers like 'Pardon My Heart' (Zuma) to feedback meltdowns that are like the Norse God of Electricity given its own voice (his recent cover of 'A Day in the Life.')"The late drummer of Buffalo Springfield, Dewey Martin, once said, 'Neil would give you a look onstage that said, *I might die during this solo -- and I'm going to take you with me!*" I have listened to life-long collaborators of his express their anguish over his canceling tours after all the deals had been worked out; one of these famous acronyms once said to me, 'Neil has been getting up every morning for 40 years knowing he won't have to do anything but exactly what he feels like doing that day.' Yet these musicians remain his biggest fans, in a world full of fans. Neil has one of the most elusive qualities of genius: inscrutability. And it's saved his art from the million traps that killed off the gifts of lesser musicians."

_________________

[Thanks to David Gans for originally tipping us off to the YouTube video]

"We should be stapling a green card to the diploma of any foreign student who earns an advanced degree at any U.S. university, and we should be ending all H-1B visa restrictions on knowledge workers who want to come here. They would invent many more jobs than they would supplant. The world's best brains are on sale. Let's buy more!"

Hear, hear!* Why not do this? I'd love to better understand any objection to this idea. Is it just the wrath of economic isolationists who think that we can solve all our woes by exclusively buying and hiring American?

June 26, 2009

So
many difficult questions emerge from the surreal life and sad loss of Michael
Jackson. Here's one: What do you do when your greatest success is almost
certainly behind you?

A
lot of people have no patience for a question like this. "Oh, I'd love to have his
problems." (For some reason, this line is best said out loud in a female
Cockney accent.)

But
for anyone with creative ambition, the emotional aftermath of success is a very
real part of life. If you're lucky enough to have any sort of audience for your
work, it's overwhelmingly likely that one particular piece of work will be a
popular favorite over the rest of your work. It may or may not be your best as
you see it. But because of the timing and the zeitgeist and other unnameable
factors, it will forever be your "biggest work."

So:
How to live with the possibility that your best work is behind you, or at least
that the public will forever think that your best work is behind you?

It
occurs to me that there are two different responses to this problem. Both are
valid, and they're not nearly as mutually exclusive as they appear at first:

1.
Face it.

2.
Deny it.

On
the one hand, any creative person has to accept the reality of creative peaks,
and that one
particular peak will always be the peakiest. As Ricky Gervais once said after
the wildly critical success of "The Office": "Something has to be your best
work."

On
the other hand, it is the compulsion of any creative mind to constantly strive
for something new and fresh; I don't think it is possible to be truly fertile without the conviction that your best work is ahead of you.

June 24, 2009

Bravo to Sharon Begley for her terrific
new Newsweek story
about how hard science has caught up to the provocative discipline known as
"evolutionary psychology." This is the field that, over the past two
decades, has asserted that many unpleasant human behaviors like militarism and
even infidelity are genetically hard-wired into every male brain. For many
years, these ideas were challenged by social liberals, but not by scientists.
Now many of the evo psych claims seem to be falling apart on their scientific
merits.

Begley ends her piece with this elegant summation of how
evolution and genes work:

"Evolution
indeed sculpted the human brain. But it worked in malleable plastic, not stone,
bequeathing us flexible minds that can take stock of the world and adapt to
it."

Over the years, we've all been taught that
genes produce certain traits. But what genes really produce is a flexible
framework that allow us to create our own traits in our own context.

June 23, 2009

It appears that
Steve Jobs, the Great One, praised be He, has returned to his perch at Apple.
His name showed up yesterday on an Apple press
release for the first time since he took medical leave in January, and Reuters reported that he
was spotted on the Apple campus.

Aside from empathy
for another human being's pain
and suffering, why do some of us care so much? Why are we so fascinated by
this man? Is it because we're still trying to figure out how one guy could
create the first truly personal computer (Macintosh), and then change the way we think about music (iPod and
iTunes), and then put the
Internet in a person's jeans pocket (iPhone)? Is it because we fear Apple can't
thrive without him? That as soon as Steve Jobs goes away, the magic new
machines will stop coming our way?

Speaking for myself,
I think it's because I'm still hoping that I will somehow grow to genuinely
like the person I have so long admired. It is vexing that this man who has done
such extraordinary things is such an (allegedly) nasty
and unpleasant person. Maybe this is the year he'll grow out of his
petulant narcissism, and will become as decent as he is brilliant. One can
always hope.

Or perhaps the
darkest possibility is also the true one: that to be that extraordinary a
leader, you must be a tyrant. From a recent Fortune profile:

"Jobs' personal abuses
are also legend: He parks his Mercedes in handicapped spaces, periodically
reduces subordinates to tears, and fires employees in angry tantrums. Yet many
of his top deputies at Apple have worked with him for years, and even some of
those who have departed say that although it's often brutal and Jobs hogs the
credit, they've never done better work."

Jobs
may have spectacular personal taste. But his true greatness, it seems, is in
his ability to get the most of out of his subordinates. He has found a way to
blend an artist's style of vision and discipline with the practical realities
of being a corporate leader. But while his products are amazing, his methods
are not very pretty to behold.

June 17, 2009

Very nice story in the NYTimes today by Benedict Carey about the vexing complexity of gene-environment interaction. The story opens with this powerful news:

"One of the most celebrated findings in modern psychiatry — that a single gene helps determine one’s risk of depression in response to a divorce, a lost job or another serious reversal — has not held up to scientific scrutiny, researchers reported Tuesday."

The original 2003 study had revealed what many were calling a "gene for depression." People with a particular variant of a gene involved in the regulation of neurochemicals seemed much more susceptible to depression when thrust into certain depressing life situations.

But it's not that simple. In the vast majority of cases, genes don't dictate a trait or a specific response. They interact constantly with other genes and every other facet of a person's ongoing life. In school, we were taught that genes contain instructions on what each of us will be like. That was view 100 years ago. Now we understand that life is the consequence of constant gene-environment interaction.

More from the Times story:

"The authors reanalyzed the data and found 'no evidence of an association between the serotonin gene and the risk of depression,' no matter what people’s life experience was, Dr. Merikangas said.

"By contrast, she said, a major stressful event, like divorce, in itself raised the risk of depression by 40 percent."

As a general rule, don't listen to anyone telling you that there's a "gene for" this or that. Even if there's an Ph.D. or M.D. at the end of the name, it's an old and misleading way of discussing genetics.

Thankfully, it's not just the science that's improving. Reporting on genetics has also been getting demonstrably better. Today's piece is a nice example, as is this extraordinary piece by Carl Zimmer from last November.

June 15, 2009

For
a few decades now, we science writers have been unwitting victims of a
scientific muddle called "heritability." Now we have a chance to wipe
the slime off and do our jobs.

The
popular confusion started in 1979, when University of Minnesota psychologist
Thomas Bouchard became fascinated with a particular pair of long-separated
identical twins, and adopted what he thought was a method to distinguish
genetic influences from environmental influences -- to statistically separate nature from
nurture. The approach was to compare the ratio of similarities/differences in
separated-identical-twins with the same ratio in separated-fraternal-twins.
Since identical twins were thought to share 100% of their DNA and fraternal
twins share, on average, 50% of their genetic material (like any ordinary
siblings), comparing these two unusual groups allowed for a very tidy
statistical calculation.

Bouchard and colleagues used the
words "heritable" and "heritability" to describe their
results.

There were just two problems with
this approach. First, these terms were possibly the most misleading in
scientific history. Second, it turns out that genetic influence cannot be separated from environmental
influences. Nature is inextricably intertwined with nurture.

***

Strangely, "heritability"
and "heritable" were actually never intended by behavior geneticists
to mean what they sound like -- "inherited." What they called
"heritability" was defined as "that portion of trait variation
caused by genes." In a quick glance, that might seem awfully similar to
"the portion of a trait caused by genes." But the difference is as
great as Mt. Everest and the anthill in front your home.

This led to quite the muddle when
Bouchard and others published twin-study data that seemed to demonstrate that
intelligence was 60%-70% "heritable." What was that actually supposed to mean?

It
did not mean that 60-70% of every
person's intelligence comes from genes.

Nor
did it mean that 30-40% of every
person's intelligence comes from the environment.

Nor
did it mean that 60-70% of every
person's intelligence is fixed, while only 30-40% can be shaped.

What
Bouchard et al intended it to mean was this (read v e r y
slowly): on average, the detectable portion of genetic influence on the
variation in -- not the cause of -- intelligence among specific groups of
people at fixed moments in time was around 60-70%.

If
that sounds confusing, that's because you are a human being.
"Heritability" is so confusing that most of the people who use it professionally
don't really understand it. Let's pick it apart:

On
average.

Heritability,
explains author Matt Ridley in his book Nature via Nurture "is a population average, meaningless for any
individual person: you cannot say that Hermia has more heritable intelligence
than Helena. When somebody says that heritability of height is 90 percent, he
does not and cannot mean than 90 percent of my inches come from genes and 10
percent from my food. He means that variation in a particular sample is
attributable to 90 percent genes and 10 percent environment. There is no
heritability in height for the individual."

"Cause
of variation" is not remotely the same as "cause of trait."

In
discussing "heritability" in the media, scientists have allowed the
public to confuse "causes of variation" with "causes of
traits." Heritability studies do not, and cannot, measure causes of
traits. They can only attempt to measure causes of differences (or variation)
in traits.

So,
for example, a heritability study cannot even attempt to measure the cause of
plant height. It cannot purport to tell you that some percent of plant height
is caused by genes.

What
it can attempt to do is measure the percentage influence that genes have on the
differences in height in a
particular group of plants. But the
percentage would only apply to that particular group.

Fixed
moments.

Heritability
derives from a fixed moment in time. It can only report on how life is, at that
moment, for the specific group studied. It cannot offer any guidance whatever
about the extent to which a trait can be modified over time, or project how
life can be for any other group or individual enjoying different resources or
values.

This
means that is these studies don't even pretend to say anything about individual
capability, or potential.

Finally,
many scientists now think that twin-study heritability estimates are sorely
compromised by a basic flawed supposition. "[They] rest on the
extraordinary assumption that genetic and environmental influences are
independent of one another and do not interact," explains Cambridge biologist Patrick Bateson
"That assumption is clearly wrong."

Now
you'll have a sense how much salt to ingest when you come across silly phrases like
this in the news:

In the end, by parroting a strict "nature vs. nurture" sensibility, heritability estimates are statistical phantoms; they purport to represent something in populations that simply does not exist in actual biology. It's as if someone tried to determine what percentage of the brilliance of "King Lear" comes from adjectives. Just because there are fancy methods available for determining distinct numbers doesn't mean that those numbers actually have any meaning.

June 12, 2009

Today's the day. If you live in one of the 2.8 million homes still reliant on a purely analog TV signal, you may be losing your signal right about now.

But maybe that's not such a disaster. Perhaps today's digital switchover is a good opportunity for all of us to reevaluate the role that TV plays in our lives.

I admit: I called for the coupon and bought the converter box. And I acknowledge that there is plenty of excellent TV out there. More channels has led to more choice and more innovation. I'm even willing to yield to Steven Johnson that some TV, in moderation, helps expand our brains.

Still, TV is pretty much a giant suction hose on our time and our brains. Very little good comes of it. I'm all for a daily dose of entertainment -- some escape, some silliness, a good heaping dose of belly laughter. But a little decent TV goes a very long way. We'd all be better off if we watched a lot less.

Remember: none of us are ever fixed in our intelligence or abilities. We are all works in progress. How we spend our time and attention matters.

It is possible to live without TV. People do it. I love the story of über-agent Ari Emanuel and his client Larry David in New Hampshire just before last year's big primary. Ari introduces his niece Gaby, a Dartmouth undergrad, to David. There is no glimmer of recognition.

"What do you do?" Gaby says.

Larry David says, "Well, I was the writer and creative force behind Seinfeld."

Gaby says, "And what was Seinfeld?"

Gaby's father, Zeke Emanuel, later told Washingtonian magazine that he’s never had a TV in his home. “It’s one of the greatest things I ever did,” he said.

Ten years ago, on an extended visit to Japan, my wife and I saw the future, and it was a very disturbing sight indeed. TV screens were everywhere -- jumbo screens all over Tokyo, large flatscreen TVs in shop windows and restaurants, tiny TV screens on phones, even TV goggles. Wim Wenders warned us all about "the disease of images" in his 1991 film Until the End of the World. Now it's actually happening. We are saturating our lives with moving video images.

June 05, 2009

If
you feel the earth slowing down a little this weekend, that's because Apple is
getting ready to stop time and make its next big iPhone announcement. Do
yourself a favor and don't try to talk to any Apple geeks (me included) from 1pm-2pm EST
Monday.

With
the iPhone, the MacBook
Air, and a few other products, Apple is in a curious position: It has
raised the bar so high on itself by turning out such extraordinary stuff, it is
now under exceptional
pressure to keep improving -- or else.

If
it doesn't, two things happen:

1.
Others start to catch up, and these competitors will charge less for a similar product.

2.
Apple loses its luster, which threatens customer loyalty (zeal) and its ability to recruit and motivate
the best talent.

In
the past, I have
railed against the "upgrade mania" of Silicon Valley, and I still
despise it when companies cynically manipulate the customer by using PR and lousy improvements to make their yesterday's whiz bang tool seem like today's embarrassing fossil.
But now I have to acknowledge that there is a positive version of this same
phenomenon:when companies find
themselves under great pressure to continually improve their products or fall
behind, quality wins.

How
did Apple first develop its culture of greatness? That's another matter which I
will address in future posts . . .